13 investigations: Hundreds of gun cases thrown in doping test fight

HOUSTON, TX (KTRK) — The detectives who spoke to DC Cormier after he reported his son missing asked him to sit down. They then told the Houston father his 20-year-old son, DJ Cormier, was found by the side of the road with a headshot and died on March 9, 2021.

“I was just blank,” the elder Cormier recalled. “They told me he was murdered, and then I pulled the detective aside and said, ‘Okay, my son was found on the side of the road like he’d been kicked out, like he was trash, like nobody loved him or so?’ “

As painful as the news of his son’s death, Cormier said he now wonders if DJ would still be alive if Quishawn Perdue, the person arrested in DJ’s death, was convicted on previous drug and weapons charges that were dismissed years earlier .

The video above is ABC13 Houston’s 24/7 streaming channel.

In Texas, carrying a gun in the commission of any other offense, including possession of marijuana, is itself a felony. However, a 2019 law made it more difficult to test whether a substance was illegal marijuana or legal hemp, resulting in dozens of cases being dropped every month.

Our investigation found more than 1,100 cases over the past three years in which police charged suspects with unlawfully carrying a gun on Harris County streets, but a judge dismissed the case, sometimes within hours.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg blames judges and prosecutors for misdemeanor and suggests other large counties in Texas don’t see the same problem. 13 investigations tried but could not independently verify the claim.

“We started noticing the gun crates that were being thrown out on an almost daily basis,” Ogg told 13 Investigates’ Ted Oberg. “I asked our prosecutors who work the 24-hour courts what was going on. They told me, anecdotally, they believed the judges would throw them out because of the probable cause related to the smell of marijuana and the inability of the courts to determine whether the officer actually smelled marijuana or hemp.”

Cops can supposedly find illegal guns, but if judges throw out the case, the guns can go back. It’s happened hundreds of times in Harris County, and we want to know why. This also applies to law enforcement agencies and victims of crime. We’re investigating tonight at 10 p.m. on Eyewitness News

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